Acting Alone opens at a cow college in Kanorado, proceeds to holiday doings in Kiev, Nebraska, home of a disturbed young Marine recently released by the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, then spirals unpredictably toward Cheyenne Mountain, home of NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) and the convent of the Servant Sisters of Saint Willibrord of Perpetual Adoration. There a dangerous plot spun by a renegade Mormon threatens to upset the protagonist's plans for material and marital well being.

"The contemporaries of Michelangelo found it useful to employ the term 'terribilita' to characterize some of the expressions of his genius, and I will quote it here to sum up the shocking impact of this work as a whole. I read it in a state of fascination, admiration, awe, anxiety, and outrage."
— R.V. Cassill, editor of The Norton Anthology of Fiction

The Place of the Yellow Woodpecker is the University of Florianopolis in Santa Catarina, Brazil in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the time of military rule. The writing is of the earth, reaching down into the culture, the poverty and hardship, and bridging to the outside, especially the US as a haven for escape — not to freedom, but to the home of a worshipped overlord of wealth and power, to be closer to that demigod and to share in the prosperity.

Like Charles Ives, like Herman Melville, Hugh Fox is an American original. There is no one else writing like him today.
— Richard Morris.

James Hemming is a personal trainer who, in his spare time, enters air guitar contests mimicking Vito Bratta of the old hair metal band, White Lion. He meets the waif-like Indigo at the gym and recruits her into a plot to make himself famous while resurrecting Vito’s legend. The tale unfolds through a pasticcio of flashbacks, diary entries, letters to Vito, and related vignettes that suddenly segue off to introduce back-stories, underlying themes, and other unexpected intersections. It's funny, quirky, perverted, and guaranteed to provoke a response.

"Mickey Z. continues to develop his unique American ouvre, this time focusing on lightning-fast tales of interconnected urban blight. It's easy to talk about punk rock writing, but Mickey really does write as if he doesn't give a fuck but knows what must be said."
—NED VIZZINI, It’s Kind of a Funny Story